Cinema: Split Ticket

THE SEDUCTION OF JOE TYNAN Directed by Jerry Schatzberg Written by Alan Alda

After a series of strike-outs like last year’s Same Time, Next Year and California Suite, Alan Alda has finally made good. In The Seduction of Joe Tynan —forget the dreadful title—he at last gives a movie performance that captures the brittle tenderness of his work on TV’s M*;A*;S*H. As Tynan, a likable liberal Senator from New York, Alda usually ends up on the side of right, yet he manages to take the sanctimoniousness out of heroism. His Senator is self-critical, unpretentious and witty. He also looks great in a three-piece suit. Were this fellow actually to enter a primary, New York’s incumbent Democrat, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, would be in serious trouble.

It is not entirely by chance that Joe Tynan is Alda’s breakthrough role: he wrote the movie himself. He is not yet a polished craftsman; the overambitious screenplay tosses out far more narrative lines than it can possibly pull back in.

Still, Alda has an instinct for intelligent comic dialogue, a willingness to engage hard issues and a sure touch for creating characters of all ages and genders. Better a jerry-built movie about solid people than the reverse.

The script creates an exhausting round robin of ethical and personal conflicts for its hero. Should Tynan lead the fight against a racist Supreme Court nominee, or should he remain silent out of deference to an old colleague (Melvyn Douglas)? Should he carry on an affair with a bright Southern civil rights lawyer (Meryl Streep) or remain faithful to his equally bright and attractive wife (Barbara Harris)? Should he pursue his presidential ambitions or spend more time at home with his increasingly estranged kids? Not only do these dilemmas have the aura of the casebook about them, but they are also resolved perfunctorily and predictably.

Nor is Alda’s vision of the political scene very fresh. The film’s breathless rehash of the G. Harrold Carswell case and its failure to acknowledge the active role of the post-Watergate press corps in Washington date it by a decade. The stale details of Director Jerry Schatzberg’s grander set pieces — among them a predominantly white and middle-aged Democratic Convention — look like the ’50s of Advise and Consent.

The intimate sequences are what give the movie its many antic and touching moments. For once, a movie love triangle features two strong heroines and credible, erotic bedroom scenes. As the troubled wife, a psychologist who loves her husband but despises public life, Harris refracts her wonderful daffiness through a spectrum of conflicting emo tions. Streep, in her first comic screen role, is at once a canny politico, a blithe belle and an uninhibited sexual partner.

Like Katharine Hepburn, she uses her regal beauty and bearing to make her sudden descents to earth all the more exciting. There are also crisp contributions from Douglas as the fading Senator, Charles Kimbrough as Tynan’s most possessive aide and Rip Torn as a sort of Wilbur Mills before the fall. When a movie has parts as fine as these, one can almost forget that they do not add up to a triumphant whole.